Field of the Invention
The invention relates to a portable data carrier configuration having an electrically programmable, non-volatile semiconductor memory, to which access can be made through contact areas on surfaces of the data carrier configuration. The invention also relates to a data processing system having at least one portable data carrier configuration.
In modern data processing systems, data are stored on digital storage media. In such cases, short-term storage takes place on hard disks or floppy disks and long-term storage takes place on floppy disks, magnetic tapes or magneto-optical disks. In those cases, filing of the storage media takes place in a conventional way in an archive. The disadvantage of such conventional storage is that the older, filed data are not on-line and consequently are not directly accessible. In addition, with that type of archiving it is necessary to keep a directory which gives information about on which of the filed copies the data being sought are stored. That copy must then be removed from the archive and be loaded into a suitable player. Complex and consequently very expensive archiving systems are constructed like a jukebox and accomplish the removal and loading automatically. However, even in those systems, a long time elapses before the data are available.
Published European Patent Application 0 552 078 A1 discloses a plug-in card for a microcomputer, which forms a reading device for chip cards with planar contacts. The plug-in card can be connected to a PCMCIA terminal of the microcomputer and has additional contacts at its upper side, which serve for electrically bonding the contacts of the chip card by the latter being placed onto the plug-in card. The chip card may be a credit card, for example.